Jean Santeuil

Jean Santeuil is an unfinished novel by Marcel Proust, written between 1896 and 1900 and published after the author's death. The first French edition appeared in 1952 from Gallimard. Its first English translation, by Gerard Hopkins, was published in 1955 in the United Kingdom and in 1956 in the United States. The work is over nine hundred pages long, so it was first printed in three volumes.

The novel follows Jean Santeuil, a young man who loves literature and poetry. It chronicles his childhood and his entry into the wider world, including his movement into high society in late nineteenth-century Paris and his experiences in other places, such as Illiers and Brittany.

It is regarded as a precursor to Proust's major work, In Search of Lost Time, both thematically and in its plot, although it is more plainly autobiographical than his later books. The novel deals with the relationship between writers and society. The composer Reynaldo Hahn, with whom Proust had a brief but intense love affair, inspired the eponymous protagonist.